After an entire year of working without any days off (except for one), I decided to be bold and take a whole two days off! My boss was oddly displeased with this, but being away from my workplace made me feel like a brand new, happier person, the work-free me. I went to one of my favorite places in the world: NYC. My cousin who lives in Ukraine was in NY for a few days and today he will come to our house for the Thanksgiving holiday. Last time I had seen my cousin R was almost 6 years ago and we hadn’t talked much since mainly because we live on opposite ends of the world and there is a bit of an age difference between us. However, he turned out to be a lot of fun. We spent the 2.5 days I was in NY going everywhere from Brighton Beach to Chinatown. We also saw the Statue of Liberty, which I hadn’t seen in over 10 years. Somehow, I was more impressed by all the typical touristy stuff I saw as a grownup than I had been as a kid. 

Food-wise, the two places that stood out were a sushi place called Jing’s in the Hell’s Kitchen area and a place in Brighton Beach called 1001 Nights which served food from Tajikistan. After stuffing ourselves to a point of not being able to breathe, we would walk off all that food and then begin again…gluttony at its finest. The funniest part about being with my cousin was that he generally did not speak English and talked to the waitress at our Japanese restaurant in Russian, she understood the gist of it somehow and brought him what he wanted. He also told a friend and I the proper way of drinking whiskey. Apparently there is a whole art in it that I will likely never master because I can’t even imagine myself drinking it.